Indiana University Cinema

Haitian Connections

Posted on February 10, 2017 by Establishing Shot

Guest post by Vivian Nun Halloran, associate professor of English and American Studies.

In celebrating the visual adaptations of the fictional works of Haitian-born, Quebec-based journalist, novelist, and screenwriter Dany Laferrière through a three-film festival, the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies sets out to deepen our collective appreciation of the imaginative richness and political valences of interamerican cultural productions featuring Caribbean artists living in diaspora. (more…)

The Fire This Time

Posted on February 9, 2017 by Jesse Pasternack

“They are, in effect, still trapped in a history which they do not understand;
and until they understand it, they cannot be released from it.”
— James Baldwin

Documentaries are the vegetables of the movie world. You may not always want to consume one, but for the sake of your health you really should. They can act like visual newspapers to provide dispatches from a turbulent present. They can bring the past to vivid life in order to provide guidance for the future. Raoul Peck’s Academy Award-nominated documentary I Am Not Your Negro accomplishes the latter task by intellectually resurrecting acclaimed writer James Baldwin. The filmmakers do this not a moment too soon, because his words are needed more than ever.

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A Western That’s Not a Western, and 9 More Reasons Why McCabe & Mrs. Miller is a Classic

Posted on February 6, 2017 by Establishing Shot

Guest post by Craig Simpson, Manuscripts Archivist at Lilly Library.

“For me, McCabe & Mrs. Miller is the standard for a sort of emotional purity, a movie whose feeling permeates you without ever once forcing a thing. Emerging from it, I always feel like the town drunk who attempts a jig on the ice in one scene: drugged, unsure of my footing, as if one step would send the whole enterprise crashing to the ground. I try to clutch the images to me even as they seem to evaporate like smoke.”
– Charles Taylor, Salon. March 21, 1997

***

A test of a great film is when you can tell it’s great even when it looks and sounds terrible. This was certainly the case for Robert Altman’s McCabe & Mrs. Miller, released in 1971 and available only in a very poor transfer on home video for many years since. Even though watching it was like squinting through a smeared glass windshield, it remained one of the most beautiful movies I have ever seen, all the more so when Criterion gave it a glorious restoration in late 2016. (The IU Cinema’s 2K DCP screening of the film on February 10 at 6:30pm is based on the same restoration.) Although the movie was not a box-office success, it has stood the test of time. Martin Scorsese is a fervent admirer. David Milch’s seminal HBO series Deadwood is a direct descendent. The late John Huston deemed it the best Western he had ever seen.

Although McCabe & Mrs. Miller is one of the most accessible films of an often challenging filmmaker, it immerses you into its world so completely that the effect can be disorienting. To offer a lay of the land, then, here are ten pieces of contextual information about the movie:

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In the Mood for Love: Nostalgia and Memory

Posted on February 2, 2017 by Aja Essex

“To those who remember fondly”
— Wong Kar Wai
From the short film: Huay Yang De Nian Hua

Nostalgia feels inherent to period pieces. Filmmakers tend to try to capture different angles on this fleeting remembrance of the past. The angle could be autobiographical, in the way Spike Lee’s 1994 film Crooklyn, set in 1973, recalls and re-purposes memories into short anecdotes as if they were being told by someone on a lazy afternoon reflecting fondly on their childhood. Nostalgia can come in the form of identifying with a period you were never a part of, but feel is more relatable and primary to your development, like Woody Allen’s 2011 film Midnight in Paris, set in the 1920s. Nostalgia can come from a reaction to great change as you look back fondly on the time right before that change, as seen in George Lucas’ 1973 film American Graffiti about the end of the summer of 1962. What makes Wong Kar Wai’s In the Mood for Love so special is that it takes all these elements of a simple yet complex state of being and shines them through the murky prism of human memory. (more…)

Glamorous Clutter in the Films of Josef von Sternberg

Posted on January 30, 2017 by Laura Ivins

Born in Austria but raised in New York, director Josef von Sternberg is best known for a series of movies he made with Marlene Dietrich in the 1930s. Through films like Blonde Venus (1932) and Shanghai Express (1932), Sternberg established a reputation for glamour, but also for pretension. He added the “von” to his name for aesthetic effect (he was born Jonas Sternberg), and multiple film critics over the years have characterized his films as shallow. All glitz – beautiful star, lush scenography – but no substance.

In this essay, I take a look at the unique mise-en-scene of Sternberg’s films and how it relates to the morally ambiguous worlds that his characters inhabit. Sternberg does have a preoccupation with surface – the textures of space and light – but his films are far from shallow. In fact, I would argue that Sternberg’s dense compositions mirror the rich subtext of his plots.

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The Beginnings of the City Lights and Underground Film Series

Posted on January 27, 2017 by Katherine Johnson

Last semester I did a blog post on the Lilly Library’s David Bradley Collection, a resource used in the selection of titles screened in the City Lights Film Series at the IU Cinema. In my explorations of this wonderful collection I discovered that not only does it have a rich history, but so too does the City Lights Film Series. At that time I talked to Joan Hawkins, Associate Professor in the IU Media School, about the process of acquiring David Bradley’s material and the beginnings of City Lights; but I soon discovered that the story of the latter, and its “sister series,” the Underground Film Series, deserved its own blog post. So, I returned to Professor Hawkins and asked her some more questions about the lives of these series.

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